Background

I recently rejoined UConn EEB after working for several years as a conservation practitioner at a national non-profit. My experiences working on the “front lines” of conservation have steered my research interests toward addressing questions that can directly influence the way conservation is done on-the-ground. Specifically, I hope to apply and advance ideas from population biology, evidence-based conservation, and systematic reserve design, with the ultimate goal of providing practitioners with the information and tools needed for making smarter conservation decisions.

In addition to conservation research, I’ve spent time studying bird song, the demographics of early-successional birds, and the transmission dynamics of zoonotic diseases. Uniting all of my past and present research projects is a general interest in better understanding and evaluating the quantitative methods by which we make inferences about ecological patterns and processes. I’m especially interested in Bayesian analyses in WinBUGS and R; I’ll be posting the code from some upcoming projects on this page.